Digital advertising is an important source of revenue for online content providers, mobile carriers as well as Internet portals such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL. A number of online advertisement formats are currently in use, along with various associated distribution requirements, advertising metrics, and pricing mechanisms. In many cases, conventional Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) techniques enable the inclusion of an advertisement within a page such that an advertisement, and often a different ad, can be selected for display each time the page is requested.
One of the ongoing challenges for advertisers across all media is to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time—i.e., effectively “targeting” advertisements to the audience. As a simple example, television commercials aired during sporting events tend to advertise beer, cars, and other products typically associated with young males. Likewise, online and digital (e.g., web-based, mobile, etc.) advertisers, content providers and ad networks look for ways to target advertisements to particular users. For example, an advertisement may be selected based on the content of the page into which it is being inserted and served, such as ads targeted to males ages 18-35 on a football-related website. Another way online advertisers provide targeted advertisements is through behavior tracking. For example, a user who frequently views financial websites and data may be targeted to receive advertisements related to online trading and banking services. In many cases, information collected through behavior tracking can be further processed and in some cases augmented with additional data sources to enable other types of targeting of advertisements, such as demographic targeting and/or collaborative filtering.
In some cases, the targeting may be subtle in that the ads do not appear as typical ads, but instead are manifested as content personalization or product recommendations.
In order to be most effective, behavioral tracking should be accurate, timely, thorough, and accessible across different domains, carriers and/or websites. For example, actions taken by a consumer at one website, within a particular domain or while using a certain service provider are most valuable when combined with actions from other domains. Furthermore, profiles generated by one domain or carrier should be accessible by another domain. In order to build and share such profiles, many websites track user behavior and interactions through the use of small data files that are deposited on the consumer's client (commonly referred to as “cookies”) to identify repeat visitors. Often, advertisers and content providers interject scripts and/or page elements into websites in order to facilitate tracking user's actions. However, the collection and use (including, in some cases, sharing) of such behavioral data may implicate security and/or privacy related issues. In some instances, such issues may be legal or administrative in nature, whereas in other cases they may relate to personal preferences.
In response, in the narrow domain of Web-based advertising, the online advertising industry, Federal Trade Commission, and many consumer protection groups have put forth numerous suggestions and guidelines for governing the collection and use of such data. Recently, the FTC issued a Staff Report detailing certain “self-regulatory principles” for online behavior-targeted advertising. Whether these principles are adopted or not, the need to manage and monitor how websites, applications, advertising networks, broadcast networks, mobile services, content providers and other advertising ecosystem participants identify, track and target consumers will expand significantly.
As such, there is a need for an independent platform that monitors and reports on compliance to targeted advertising guidelines and practices.